I haven’t been writing here because my Dad is in the hospital, and it felt a little strange to be writing about anything else, and I didn’t want to write about him, so. He had a heart attack last week and then bypass surgery. Quintuple. Then he had a stroke. Then there were the details that led up to the heart attack, one of which was that he was so dehydrated when he came in that he probably had not had anything to drink or eat for 24 hours. It’s been really strange, having to process everything as it’s happening. I mean I know I do that every day, I have an experience, I feel something, I react, I compare it to other experiences and then I have an opinion. But with this, each bit of information came so quickly that there was a bit of a jam up in the processor, I wasn’t really finished with one thing before another came in. Plus, some of what was coming in –like Father, Relationships, Death—was, you know, larger in scale, and carried with it all kinds of things not related to this particular experience. Then there’s the backdrop of world events: earthquake, tsunami, nuclear melt down, combined with my personal and immediate events and yeah, that’s the long winding road I go down.
But he’s good for now. And it has never felt overwhelming or tragic. I like that doctors can go into a person’s chest with the same ease that a mechanic goes under the hood of a car, despite the fact that it involves sawing a person’s upper body open, breaking their chest bone and slowing the heart rate down to practically nothing. I like that the surgeon was Asian and wore blue jeans (precise! casual!) And I like his nurse whose name is Raoul. He is big and muscular and funny and completely inappropriate and my Dad cries every time he talks about him.
Raoul told us a story when my Dad was first conscious, about a patient he cared for once who died (yes, he just said it!) and they zipped her into a bag and wheeled her away to the morgue. The only spot left in the freezer (?!) was way up high on a rack so, sweating and grunting, they got the body up there, then returned to the room and found her dentures in a glass. Shit! (Raoul said) so he went back to the morgue, climbed up the stack, pried her mouth back open (because rigor mortis had set in)(he thought he was going to need a crow bar!), forced the teeth in, and then went back to the room, feeling all proud of himself to have avoided some trouble.
Except that when he returned, he found the family of a former patient who said they were looking for their grandfather’s teeth and they were certain they had left them in a glass in room 106. Raoul pretended to consider this for a moment, and said I think I know where they are. He ran back to the morgue, climbed, pried and fetched, and brought them back to the family and handed them to the man in the wheelchair, who then put them right back into his mouth.
Dead bodies, zipping body bags, morgue, Shit!, rigor mortis, making mistakes; each cringe-inducing detail just cancelled out the one before it. It was kind of miraculous, just like the operation itself.
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